My Reykjavik University Aperio advisor surprised me yesterday when he mentioned how cool I was in that YouTube video. I had no idea what the hell he was going on about and made an expression similar to those in surprise-photo-shoots. As the expression wore off he explained my brother had uploaded a video of my visit to the MIT Media Lab in 1993. At the time he was working on multi-modal AI systems, which I happily agreed to test—the result of which is in the video below =)

The Advanced Human Interface Group (AHIG), MIT Media Lab. The ICONC System, demonstrated by Hrafn Th. Thorisson, Summer 1993. The system enabled the use of co-occurring, natural speech and gesture to interactively describe the arrangement and movements of objects in a room. The computer would interpret the user’s actions and figure out which objects the user was talking about and how to arrange them based on spatial information in the user’s speech and gesture. [Excerpt from the YouTube description, continued below]

The main authors of this work were David Koons (spatial knowledge, multimodal integration) and Carlton Sparrell (gesture recognition), directed by Richard A. Bolt. This technology is described in part in the paper “Integrating simultaneous input from speech, gaze, and hand gestures” by D B Koons, C J Sparrell, K R Thorisson (1993).

UPDATE (Oct. 30th, 2009): The article stated, wrongly, that this took place in 1994. This has been corrected.